The old woman lies at the bottom of the steps. Her lower leg dangles at an odd angle, as if it wasn’t originally attached to her, but squirreled its way across the basement floor somehow, and latched on. A bloody bone, sliced through the skin at her shin, throbs. She breathes in and coughs, her lungs filling with musty earth and the sour smell of wet clothes in the washer, there for two days now.
“My name is Irene Finkle, she says to herself in a scratchy, high- pitched tone that she doesn’t recognize as her own voice. “Today is Tuesday, January the 19th. And I’m going to be alright.”
The ring finger on her left hand is blue and bloated. She holds her hand in front of her face, straining to focus. Her gold wedding band, almost invisible now, is sunk deep into the puffy crease. She gently strokes the ring with one finger, like it’s a fragile baby bird.
“Floyd, please,” she whispers, as if her ex-husband can hear her. “Why couldn’t you have stayed? I needed you.”
Irene shudders to think someone might hear her talk like this. Floyd is a bad man, after all, and she knows it. He’s sitting in his easy chair across town right now with his new wife, Janice. Well, she’s not that new. Floyd married her years ago. He paraded her around town for the last five years of his marriage to Irene. He liked her accommodating ways, he said. She liked to do things Irene would not.
Irene would never take off that ring. It was her silent protest against all that had happened. Against the foul things he had asked her to do in the name of marriage. She would die down here in this basement, serenading the heating ducts, before she’d acknowledge their vulgar, so-called union. Saying no sometimes didn’t make her a bad wife, she told Floyd. Saying yes made Janice a better one, he replied, as he urged her to sign the papers on a frigid March day, with the smell of stale cigarettes and bourbon on his breath.
Irene never said no at first. She didn’t realize she could.
“Here, turn this way,” he’d say. “Put on these sparkly heels and get your legs up higher. Or, let me go in from the back.” Floyd groped and grunted and slapped and bucked her like she was a wild animal, day in and day out. He’d speed home from his job at the oil change center, push his way through the door at 5:30 sharp, and with no thought of her effort to get dinner
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on the table, he’d tell her to get ready. He smiled his big pearly-white smile and pulled a beautiful, gift-wrapped box from behind his back and shuffled on his feet like a little child, saying “open it, open it!”
The first time he brought home a gift, Irene shuffled with excitement too, dreaming of the star pendant she’d seen in the jewelry store window. The one with the little diamond that she’d told him she liked. But she was wiser now at twenty-two, and she knew that ribbons and bows were not for her. They were gifts he took great care to give to himself. Dread pumped up in her throat like bile as she untied ribbons in every color and removed box tops warily, as if a rattler might jump out and bite her.
What now? she wondered.
A red wig this time, long, with bangs.
“Wear this and let me call you Nurse Shelly,” he said, already tearing at his clothes and throwing them on the floor. “I’ll be Doctor Tom.”
Not very imaginative, Irene thought.
“Floyd, the biscuits are in the oven,” she said, beginning to undress anyway. She knew resisting was futile. She knew he’d hound her relentlessly and force himself on her with his doctor/nurse charade, while the biscuits turned black and the pressure cooker full of beans hissed and screamed. He entered her from behind and pulled back on the red wig like it was her real hair, until it was half off her head. He popped her on the buttocks in the same spot until it turned bright red and stung like a bee sting, all the while yelling, “Yes, Yes Nurse Shelly! I love it when you follow doctor’s orders!”
When he was finished, he rolled a Pall Mall cigarette, poured himself a bourbon and sat down at their small kitchen table in the calmest fashion, and waited in silence. She stepped into her dress and buttoned it all the way up to her neck. She walked into the kitchen, pulled the smoking biscuits from the oven and scooped out a large pile of beans, avoiding the crusty, scorched bottom. She served him a plate and made herself a small one, and picked at it while standing at the counter.
He didn’t thank her, but he never complained about the dinner either. He knew the state of it was his fault. He always ate in the same fashion, ravished, like a starving child from Africa, and then left his dishes for her to clean. He moved slowly into the next room, turned on the radio, and pulled up close to it. Irene knew he’d be there for exactly one hour. Floyd was peculiar about time. Everything with him started and began on the half hour.
“Damned politicians,” he muttered while he listened and swigged at the bourbon. “They’re all a bunch of crooks. “
She soaked the pressure cooker pot and moved it to the side of the sink for cleaning in the morning. She felt a burning sensation inside herself
from Floyd’s constant need. She’d soak in bath salts later, when he was done with her for the evening, but she knew that time hadn’t come yet.
Floyd wasn’t always a bad man. Especially in the beginning. She’d married him at 16, in a small brick church in Emma’s Grove, in 1945, near the end of the war. She wore a white cotton dress and lace-up boots with her soft blonde hair in pin curls. He was 15 years her senior and oh was he handsome, in his double-breasted black suit, with shiny black hair to match, and transparent sea-green eyes. Before they married, her mother had fawned over Floyd like a school girl when he paid Irene a visit. It was as if he was there for her and not Irene. Floyd brought his bible along and Irene’s mother liked that. She would usher them both into the parlor and they’d pretend to recite verses and prayers while she was watching, then secretly, they’d hold hands while she made tea for them in the next room. When Floyd left for the evening, Irene’s mother would say, “Now, that man’s a good husband for you, Irene. You won’t find better.”
On their wedding night, Floyd gently removed her clothes and promised her he wouldn’t hurt her. His grown-man body warmed her enough to erase her nervous goose bumps and cause her to relax in her thin nakedness. He mounted her and pushed himself in carefully, a little at a time, asking her over and over if was she was alright. Irene had braced herself for pain, like her mother told her to, but Floyd put his hand over hers and kissed her and she felt none. Just the love and tenderness of a man she barely knew. A man she called her husband.
A limb from a leafless maple claws at the frosty window. A round robin sits for a minute, peering in at Irene, but soon flies off, likely as irritated by the scratching limb as Irene is. The cold cement floor of the basement seeps through her bones like liquid poison. She reaches for an old paint tarp, pulls it over herself and braces for darkness and the freezing temperatures to come.
“Is this what it all comes down to?” she cries, but nothing comes out. The tarp doesn’t help in the way of warming her, but the paint flecks of mint green and pale blue reminds her of her youth. Of a time when a bad choice was as simple as a color you didn’t wish to look at anymore, and could be brushed over easily with something beautiful and fresh.
Large snowflakes begin to fall outside the window and Irene knows the town will close down like it always does, with the slightest dusting. She hears the radio upstairs. She keeps it on day and night for company. The disc jockey, Marty Sloan, is running through the closings, his voice deep and drawn out. No school, no church, no bingo at the senior center, no Meals on
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Wheels delivery. Irene knows this means no Carmen, her Wednesday Meals on Wheels girl. No Carmen with the sweet, round face and coffee-colored eyes. No Carmen with the kind words and the little fluffy dog named Poquito that she brings along for Irene to pet. No Carmen with the meatloaf and the mashed potatoes and the milk. She would be stuck down here for another day.
She pulls the tarp to her chin, closes her eyes and imagines colors. Sunny warm yellows and greens, all the hues of spring, like those in a child’s Easter basket.
“My name is Irene Finkle, she says to herself. Today is Tuesday, January 19th. And I’m going to be alright.”
Her eyes close to black, and the whistle of a detached wind. A large freezer hums, its motor generating the smallest whisper of heat that warms Irene’s injured leg. She smiles at the dream of a faint knock.